As a worker in a distributed organization, who meets with team members almost exclusively through technological means, I can understand some of Yahoo’s trepidation. However as a supposed leader in technology & communications, Yahoo is in a position to further opportunities for workers to telecommute, or work from remote offices, rather than claim it is un-workable, and should be curtailed.

Yahoo should step up and use this opportunity to create tools for distant workers and telecommuters, and place opportunities for such communications in the marketplace.

I work remote and it works out quite well with our team but our company is in a top position (doing well). Yahoo needs to change their culture and heavily increase their productivity+creativity.

I think this could help tremendously by setting a new tone for the company but I do not think they should make it permanent.

JohnDoey

The really bad thing for Yahoo here is that video calls just went mainstream recently. So the average punter is taking FaceTime meetings with people in other countries even more casually than they used to make a long distance phone call. And also going mainstream is the mobile PC. You need computing? You pull an iPad mini out of your purse, you don’t get in your car and drive to an office building and sit in a cubicle to get computing.

Now here comes Yahoo, supposedly a forward-thinking Silicon Valley technology company who guides you through the Internet, and they are saying that FaceTime and IM and email and mobility can’t replace cubicle farming. That’s kind of the opposite of what Yahoo has been telling us all these years.

I really believe in having one in-person meeting to start each week, but I also believe that if you’re sitting at a computer all day, you might as well have the computer come to you rather than the other way around.

The irony is that American companies treat their workers like independent subcontractors they can fire at any time, yet want the workers to act like they are in a strong union. They’ll lay somebody off and just give you that person’s work in addition to your own, but complain when you don’t want to spend 2 hours driving back and forth from the computer at home to the computer in a cubicle at work?

The really stupid part is that whatever Yahoo hoped to gain from this new policy, they have already lost in employee morale and esprit de corp. Yahoo workers will basically be on strike for a while. People who were doing 10 hours of hard work at home will come into the office for 8 hours and do the minimum.

There’s another factor in play if Yahoo’s based in a state that goes after employers for taxable wages as aggressively as New York does, and attempts to classify in-house freelancers or contract workers as full employees.